


A Change of Heart

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [111]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Bottom Thor (Marvel), Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 07:50:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15681153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: “Oh,” Loki said, drawing the word out like taffy. “This is where I give you advice and you pretend you're going to take it. I like this part.”





	A Change of Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Oh...This is where I give you advice and pretend you're going to listen to it. I like this part. Prompt from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

“Oh,” Loki said, drawing the word out like taffy. “This is where I give you advice and you pretend you're going to take it. I like this part.”

“Loki.”

“No, no,” Thor’s brother said, settling back in the _New Asgard_ ’s makeshift throne. He drew the silken wings of his sleeping robe around him and smiled, imperious. “Please. It wouldn’t be any fun if I actually thought you would listen to me, see the wisdom in my words or any of that. It’s so much better this way: me telling you precisely how you’re about to crash and burn, you dousing yourself in pitch and diving off the nearest cliff anyway. Really, it’s charming.”

Thor crossed his arms and turned about, glaring, though, admittedly, it was difficult to feel terribly menacing when he was naked. But so be it. “Are you done?”

“Maybe.” Loki tossed up an elegant hand and drew it through the semi-darkness, as if he could somehow touch the starlight that showered over them, the eyes of the vast universe that stared down from the Great Room’s enormous view port. “Ask me the question again.”

Thor gritted his teeth. “Do you have true qualms about going to Earth, or no?”

“Hmmm,” Loki said. He tapped a finger over his lips, lips still flush, Thor noticed, from the crush of Thor’s own, from their ardent stretch around Thor’s cock. “Shall I be blunt?”

Thor cleared his throat. “I’ve never known you to pull your punches."

Loki looked amused. But then, when did he not? “Brother, if your purpose is to be worshipped, then I can think of no better place for you to tread than on Earth.”

“That’s not what I--”

“That is,” Loki said, “if the affections of your people, those to whom you are their true king, are not enough for you. If they fail to fulfill your heart’s need to be loved and adored.”

Thor threw up his hands. “You’re twisting every damn thing I said, Loki.”

Loki laughed. “Tsk tsk tsk,” he said. “It’s the right of a king to be worshipped. There is no shame in that. If you want to drag what’s left of Asgard halfway across the galaxy so you have a new world at your feet, well--let’s say, I understand the sentiment.”

Now Thor was angry. He stomped towards the throne, towards the insolent spread of his brother’s body, his feet slipping in the rivers of silk that spilled from his brother’s robe. “Don’t you dare,” he hissed. “Don’t you fucking dare compare this to your idiotic crimes.”

“Idiotic?” Loki clutched a hand to his chest. “Brother, you wound me. I was very nearly successful.”

Thor caught the arms of the chair and swung his brother fully to face him. “You saw innocents slaughtered. Yours was a path of destruction, of pain! And you were in thrall to a--”

Loki slapped him, a cruel collision of flesh. The sound of it rang from the walls as the sting sang across Thor’s skin. “I was in thrall,” Loki said like ice, “to no one. There was a price to be paid for living, Thor, for the continued gift of my existence. Was Midgard itself really so much to ask?”

A growl in Thor’s throat, a rare sort of fury. “That you would ask that shames me, Loki.”

Loki laughed again, but the sound was quite different this time. It was bitter, a raw sort of ache. “Shames you? Shames _you_?” He bared his teeth. “Why in the Realms do you think I bothered to come back? Don’t you know how much easier it would’ve been to die? I heard the call of Valhalla as I fell, brother, so loud and so clear that I could pick out every voice, every ancestor who beckoned me home. But I fought them, resisted, clawed my way back to life the only way I found that I could.”

“Thanos,” Thor spat.

“Yes, Thanos,” Loki said. “That vile creature forced me to make a bargain, to barter what I wished for what he desired.”

Thor’s face twisted and he grabbed at Loki’s shoulders, shook them. “Hence my shame,” he said. “That you would be so selfish, brother.”

Something in Loki’s eyes shifted. “Selfish?” he said. “Is that what you call it?”

“Trading a world for one life? What else should I call it? A kindness?”

His brother turned away, the fire in his face disappearing as if Thor’s words were the wind, the very rain. “You think I did all of that for myself. Solely so that I could survive. Is that it?”

“Of course,” Thor said. “Why else would you bother?”

There was a long, long silence, so long that Thor became aware that he was looming, pinning Loki and his ridiculous silks to the chair, and that Loki’s hands--those lovely creatures, always in motion--instead lay dead in his brother’s lap. A kind of surrender. It stirred something in Thor, something that slipped past the fury, a quicksilver feeling that tapped tentatively at his heart.

“You don’t understand anything, do you?” Loki said at last. His voice was flat, a pale monotone. “And here I was thinking you did. Oh more the foolish me.”

Somehow, Thor’s hands had lifted, flown silent from Loki’s shoulders to wind themselves the wild, dark tangle of Loki’s hair, and still his brother would not look at him, his eyes fixed instead on the stars. “Tell me, then,” Thor said. “What is it that eludes me?”

Loki let out his breath and found his words carefully, giving weight to each one. “I subjected myself to all that indignity,” he said, “to Thanos’ crudity, his cruelty, brother, so that I could come back to you.”

“To--?”

Loki lifted his gaze and it was like being singed by a thousand candles, the brightness of each alone enough to blind. “To you, Thor. To this.” His hands on Thor’s sides, the soft drag of each palm up his back. “I adore you, oaf, with all my heart and more. I have all the days of my life. I thought you knew that.”

“I do,” Thor said, fervent, that quicksilver now on his tongue. “I _do_.”

“And yet,” Loki said, his soft words like a thunderclap, “you cannot understand why I would make a bargain--any bargain--do anything that was required so that I might know one more moment like this? One more moment with you.”

Thor stared at him, this dark-haired wonder who had consumed so much of his life, to whom he had given it, freely. “I don’t--” he managed, “but then why--? Why are you only telling me this now?”

“Oh, Thor,” his brother sighed, “I thought it was obvious.”

Then they were kissing, messy and wild, and Loki was clawing at Thor’s skin, the room calling out each moan. Thor’s heart was full and there were a thousand words he was anxious to say, a hundred things he ached to give voice to, a dozen promises he was suddenly, finally, ready to make. How could he have misread Loki so completely? How eager he’d been to assign Loki the blame, to make him bear more than his fair share of shame, for even in the midst of battle, as his brother summoned destruction to Earth, knowing Loki was alive, seeing him in the flesh, even striking him, had stoked in Thor so much joy that he had burned with it. Loki was alive, Loki was _alive_ , and when he’d died again--not in some vast chasm of space but in the clutch of Thor’s arms--something in Thor had turned black, withered and sick.

And now, and now, Loki was in his arms again, living, biting at Thor’s lips and scoring Thor’s chest with his nails, and why Thor had been so ready to blame Loki still, after all that had passed between them, after all they had lost and somehow been allowed to regain, he could not comprehend.

“You’re thinking too much,” Loki murmured. “I can hear you from down here.”

“I’m not,” Thor panted. “I’m not, I’m just--”

“You’re just what? Hmmm?” Those cool fingers brushed his cock, moved past it, came to rest at the wet, open stretch of his hole. “Still ready for me, _dyret_? I hope so.”

A groan slipped out of him, a sound in the shape of his brother’s name.

“Good,” Loki said, beaming at him through a kiss. “That’s good.”

He nudged Thor away, stood, and let the silk spill from his shoulders. With a flick of his wrist, the robe slunk away and spread itself across the floor before the viewport, its wild colors by turns muted and highlighted by the stars. One moment, Thor was kissing him, that long, lanky body pressed tight against his; in the next, he found himself on his back and Loki tucked between his legs, his tongue quick and busy.

There were no games now, no teasing; none of Loki’s usual gloating exhortations about how wet Thor was, how good he tasted, how desperate Loki had managed to make him. Instead, after a few hungry licks, Loki sat up and shoved Thor’s thighs wide and drove straight inside, the heat of his cock tempered by its hint of lingering cold, the sense of delicious strangeness that in all their years together had never quite gone away.

Thor reached for his brother, wound his arms around Loki’s neck unabashed, and whined into their kisses, each touch of their mouths turning his cries louder and louder.

“I know,” Loki said, soothing. “I know, dearest.”

It was not as though their joinings had been tempered before, that their lovemaking, once reignited onboard the _New Asgard_ , had been staid. But now, as Loki nuzzled his beard and fucked into him, heady, it felt different, as if something had shifted, as if the universe itself had drawn a line beneath them and underscored, once and for all, how important this was to Thor, how vital; how their love for each other defined them both, damned them, and was the only thing in all the Realms that could redeem them.

Thor’s hands closed around the swell of Loki’s ass and drew him in deeper, his brother’s shout dulcet in his ear.

“I’m going to fill you now,” Loki managed.

Thor pressed their foreheads together. “Are you?”

“Yes, _dyrat_. Yes.”

“You’re going to spill in me, brother?”

Loki shuddered, a tremor that Thor could feel through every inch of his body. “Oh, fuck. I can’t help it. Can’t.”

“My darling,” Thor got out, each word a glorious fight, “you’ve already given me everything that you have. What’s a little bit more?”

*****

After a time, when they were both spent, Thor stroked a hand through his brother’s hair and said: “I think you’re right.”

“Hmmm?” Loki stirred against his chest.

“I said, you’re right.”

A yawn. “Generally speaking, yes. Can you be more specific?”

“About Earth. I don’t think we should go there.”

“Really? And why is that?”

“To do so would be to look back. To dwell in the past.” Thor tipped his head and faced the universe, the points of life spread out through the black. “I’d rather find a way forward. And I think that’s best for Asgard, too. Not to forget what was, but to have a chance to rebuild anew.”

Loki sat up, his dark hair falling willful over his face. “What is this?” He poked at Thor’s chest. “A change of heart? From Thor? My word. You must’ve been replaced by a different king, by some sort of sorcery as I slept.”

“Mmm,” Thor said. He reached for Loki’s face and spread a thumb over one flushed cheek, let it rest over his brother’s reddened mouth. “Not a change of heart, really. More like--a new appreciation for the wisdom of the old.”

Loki smiled, the sort of smile that lit up his whole face. He kissed the tip of Thor’s thumb and nudged it away. “Now that,” he said, “is the wisest thing, at the very least, that you’ve said all day.” He dipped his head and brushed their mouths together. “Though if you refer me as old in mixed company, my darling, I’ll cut off the rest of your hair.”

**Author's Note:**

> ...an MM with a beginning, middle, and an end. What a novelty.


End file.
